text: Editor's note: If you're not caught up, you may feel that some plot references below are mild spoilers. Fair warning. As Scandal careens toward its midseason finale, I am remembering the moment last year when I finally got the show. When I finally understood why about 10 million of us are hooked every Thursday and why we generate more than 300,000 tweets that are seen by 2 million people. It happened in bed. No, I was alone. I had too many pillows and nothing to drink. My roommate was in his room playing a version of online Chinese poker. I was bingeing on old episodes of Scandal and reading tweets on my phone. The tweets made me laugh some of the time, and other times, they made me pause in that way you do when your best friend has made a joke about race politics that's hysterical but also incredibly sad. I leaned back on my pillows and began to feel that the whole setup was familiar. The over-the-top plot twists. The community chatter. The sense that every Thursday night I am not just watching television but I am a part of something much larger — a show that every other woman of color is probably also watching. Why did it feel like I had been here before? Because, in fact, I had. I grew up on telenovelas. Spanish-language soaps, like Scandal, happen at night. I watched them with my mother and sister and aunties, and when a good telenovela came on, we all knew that so-and-so next door and over across town was also tuned in to the same episode. A fabulously good telenovela made you think about the turns life takes. It gave you pause and dreams and, most of all, it gave you a sense of community. We might have been growing up in a country that didn't want immigrants, but for an hour each night, the women in my family and I joined a community as well as the conversations and shared stories that came with it. Is Scandal a telenovela? Shonda Rhimes, the show's creator, might not think so. She told Vulture and other outlets that it pisses her off when the show is compared to a soap or referred to as a "guilty pleasure." She considers that to be a backhanded compliment. But a successful telenovela is different from its English soap-opera cousins. There are four reasons Scandal qualifies: 1. The Famoso Prime Time Many people make the mistake of thinking that Spanish soaps and English ones are twinsies in different languages. They're not. They do both have plots that center on romance, intrigue and murder, but unlike their English cousins, telenovelas snag the prime-time slots coveted by advertisers. The telenovela is the cash cow of Spanish-language television. Last week, for example, the top prime-time shows on Spanish-language television were telenovelas. Their English equivalents would be The Big Bang Theory, Dancing With the Stars and, of course, Scandal. In other words, to qualify as a good telenovela, a show needs more than just romance, sex and absurd plot twists. It needs reach. Lots of it. The kind shows get only on prime time. Yes, we have telenovelas on during the day, but the real ones — the good ones — come on at night. Like Scandal. As Brenda Salinas recently pointed out: "Telenovelas are much more popular than soap operas." An estimated 5.6 million people watch telenovelas every night. That's almost double the number of folks watching daytime English soaps, according to Nielsen, and they're not even counting our primas and tías in Latin America. So when Rhimes says Scandal is not a soap, she's right. It's not a daytime English soap. It's a prime-time telenovela. 2. La Power Lady Spanish soaps might conjure up images of a doe-eyed Latina who is white and virginal (yes, notice the conflation of race and morality) and who pines after a powerful man. While that is true for many telenovelas, it does not speak for all of them and especially not for the good ones that you remember 10 years later. A number of telenovelas have actually starred Olivia Pope power-type mujeres. The telenovela Simplemente Maria aired in the late '80s with a lead woman who didn't go from rags to riches by "marrying up" but by starting her own fashion design firm. The telenovela Yo Soy Betty, La Fea boasted a young woman good at math and leading a company (even if she did have a beauty makeover). And more recently, La Reina del Sur featured a lead character as the queen of a drug cartel. Part of the appeal of these power telenovela women is that they are also still essentially "good women" at heart. And the same is true of Olivia Pope. Yes, a recent episode had her "handling" a situation like her infamous Papi Pope, and yes, she is sleeping with a married man and keeping another on call. But at the end of the day, for all her complexity, Olivia still has a good heart. Think about it. She defends the survivor of domestic violence and gets a single mom elected to Congress. She persuades Fitz to talk about gun control in a personal way to the nation. She might not be the woman you want your niece to become, but Olivia Pope still has e